Movie Review: The Social Network

Movie Review: The Social Network, or What’s Wrong with WASPs

Growing up in the dispensationalist stew of the Deep South, my childhood opinions of Jews were of a purely historical nature. The Jews were “God’s Chosen People” in the Bible and my awareness of them as a contemporary people was present to some extent but not much of a practical concern. We simply did not know any real life Jews in my rural county. Only later, as I began my investigation into the root causes of our societal decline, did I become aware of Jews as a distinct, contemporary people group and the necessary but not sufficient role some of them played in our civilization’s decline. The work of Kevin MacDonald is particularly useful. Yes, I know MacDonald is an “evolutionary psychologist,” which tends to scare off Christians, but MacDonald’s evolution is of the micro variety (i.e. relatively small differences in personality between people groups) and his primary contribution is that of a historian, not a biologist. MacDonald’s analysis of the outright academic fraud of Freud, Boas, the Frankfurt School and the 1965 immigration debate are invaluable. However, since I still live in the Deep South, my knowledge of Jews is still mostly academic. Though Hollywood does what it can to malign my people here in the South, the primary personal victims of Jewish intelligence, aggression and unethical behavior are Yankee WASP’s in places like New York and California, where our domestic Jewish population is heavily overrepresented. This is why movies like The Social Network are particularly interesting to me, for they can provide a visceral appreciation of these differences beyond an academic understanding.

It is important to note that MacDonald’s research shows that only a particular type of Jew has been historically problematic in the United States. Western European Jews largely contented themselves with making lots of money, largely due to their higher intelligence and the opportunities created by pietist Christians who saw the pursuit of wealth as inherently immoral. These Jews were very small portions of antebellum America, and were loyal citizens. MacDonald shows that it is in fact the recently immigrated Eastern European Jews who stir up most of the trouble that gets blamed on Jews generally. These Jews have a more fundamental hatred of Western peoples and culture, probably stemming from their historical role as middlemen used by Eastern European elites to manage their estates.

The Social Network tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Jewish, likely Eastern-European-descended founder of Facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire. The most interesting facet of the story is Zuckerberg’s deep-seated resentment of WASP’s, particularly the Winkelvoss twins, members of an exclusive WASPy Harvard club that excluded geeky Jews like Zuckerberg and also Olympic-class rowers on Harvard’s crew team. The movie spends quite a bit of its early plot detailing the feelings of Jews like Zuckerberg: the dorky parties thrown by the Jewish fraternity compared to the old-money exclusive WASP clubs, the general physical attractiveness and greater size of the WASP athletes and Zuckerberg’s obsession with ascending the social order.

Early in the movie, Zuckerberg makes a reputation for himself as an extremely gifted, rebellious programmer when he creates a website called Facemash that pairs up female Harvard undergraduates in “faceoffs” where the user is asked to click on the face they find most attractive. Zuckerberg then feeds the data into a fuzzy ranking algorithm that, over time, would reveal a fairly robust ranking of the pecking order of beauty among the female undergrads. He has to hack into several computer systems to get access to the pictures, breaking numerous university policies, and landing himself on academic probation along with a reputation as a creepy jerk on campus.

Meanwhile, the Winklevoss twins have come up with an idea for a website: Harvard Connect, a site like Myspace but with the exclusivity of only allowing members with harvard.edu email addresses (one of the early issues with Myspace is that its heavy concentration of musicians and other artists gave it a distinctly prole, uncouth vibe, which ultimately led to its decline into a sort of Internet ghetto). After seeing Zuckerberg’s work with Facemash, the twins contact him to be their programmer in a joint venture to create Harvard Connect. Over the next month, Zuckerberg steals their idea to create his own website “The Facebook,” all the while leading on the Winklevoss with various excuses for his delay in programming their site. Zuckerberg’s actions, of course, are illegal intellectual property theft, but as with all things legal, possession is 9/10 of the law and there is little one can do in the short term to prevent it outside of a grinding, slow, expensive and uncertain lawsuit.

The Winklevoss find out about Zuckerberg’s betrayal and are furious. However, in a particularly revealing scene, they refuse to sue him. They have their father’s attorney send a cease and desist letter to Zuckerberg, which he ignores, but other than that the twins insist that they are “Harvard men of honor” who would not do something as vulgar as suing a fellow undergraduate. They appeal to the President’s office, again revealing the WASPy naievity, as the Jewish head of Harvard, Larry Summers, tells the boys that Harvard will not get involved even though Zuckerberg’s actions violated the student handbook. You can see the incredulity in their eyes as they confront Summers. This Zuckerberg guy broke the rules, and you’re supposed to enforce the rules. Their gentile brains, with their universalist delusions that everyone shares their innate sense of right and wrong (“good sportsmanship” and all that – which Jews see as a delusional, degenerate weakness on our part), simply cannot compute that Summers would refuse to follow Harvard’s own rule book.

Filed early, a lawsuit could have shut down Zuckerberg’s project before it reached critical mass, but their delay only served as evidence that an injunction was unnecessary, reducing their negotiating leverage. Months later, the Winklevoss sue, but it was too late. They end up settling for $60+ million, a small fraction of the value of Facebook. Arguably, under the law, all of Zuckerberg’s profits and equity should have been seized and given to them. Yet, legal reality is different. As their lawyers no doubt advised them, when the Pharisees run the courts (which is especially true in the rats’ nest along the New York-Boston-DC Axis of Evil) it’s going to be nearly impossible for good Christians to get justice.

Zuckerberg is a particularly pathological character, of course, but he is an extreme archetype of Jews, particularly those hailing from Eastern Europe where the hatred of Gentiles was most acidic. If the Winklevoss had inherited some of their ancestors’ old-fashioned anti-Semitism, they would have known that it’s generally a bad idea to do business with Jews. Lacking the Christian sense of fair play and good sportsmanship (that even nominal, cultural Christians like the Winklevoss still largely possess, and reinforced through athletics), nursing resentments against our culture and people, the temptation to cheat is almost impossible for them to overcome. The lesson for Christians is simple: avoid dealings with Jews, for they are too risky.

Now, some of you will be shocked by that statement. But think about it: these are highly intelligent, aggressive people who are completely unregenerate and devoid of the Holy Spirit. Not only that, they do not share our cultural heritage, which makes most non-Christian white Gentiles fairly Christian in their behavior (thankfully, and illogically, and dissipating as we get further from our heritage of genuine belief). Many of you will protest that my prescription is illegal. Actually, only employers have any sort of restriction on religious discrimination, and then only when you have 15 employees or more. You are perfectly free to discriminate when hiring contractors, professionals like attorneys and accountants and business partners. Since these are the individuals who can do you the most harm, making use of one’s right of free association is a key protective business strategy. As a Christian, if you really believe regeneration is real and the Holy Spirit is real, I don’t see how you can not discriminate. To say within the Church, that only believers are truly capable of good works, and then to totally ignore that theological postulate outside the Church is inconsistent. It’s against the spirit of our age certainly, an age in which Christians are expected to never utter a word about the exclusivity of their faith and the absolute Kingship of Jesus Christ, but it’s not wrong.

The second lesson from the Winklevoss: we as Gentiles need to lose some of our naivety and natural trust in others. We’re no longer living in a German village where everyone is your third cousin and theft, adultery and lying are unheard of (the analysis of the Roman historian Tacitus of the pagan Germans), such that you have the luxury of trusting everyone. Quite simply, we need to involve lawyers and other advisers early in our business decision making process; the legal system in this country is a racket, not a justice system, and you have to hire an expert to make sure you play the racket correctly. There’s a saying in legal circles, which I can confirm with painful experience, and it’s an acronym: ELAINE, which stands for Early Legal Advice Is Not Expensive. If any of the characters cheated by Zuckerberg had bothered to have their own reasonably competent attorney review documents or create basic documents (for example, a non-disclosure agreement before sharing the idea with Zuckerberg), they could have avoided much heartache. They might even be billionaires instead of multi-millionaires. At the root of this though is another is another WASP defect: we’re cheap. The Winklevoss, instead of having their own attorney vet and protect their business venture (an expense of a few thousand dollars to a family worth millions), used their father’s in-house corporate counsel to send the cease and desist letter. They then held off for months before hiring an attorney to pursue their interests.

A wise man learns and profits from others’ mistakes. Go and do likewise.

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Faith & Heritage is a consortium of Christian writers from a traditionalist perspective. F&H features a diverse range of opinions among its writers, and any particular opinion expressed is not necessarily indicative of universal agreement among F&H admins or writers.

The superhero genre was one of the last quasi-traditional genres of American pop culture. Batman, Superman, and the other assorted heroes and villains literally came out of the early twentieth-century[…]

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Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deuteronomy 32:7-8